Vietnamese Bike Racing

Hey, I'm Khoi, co-founder of BAG. I wrote this after spending 3 years building Fanhouse, a VC-backed creator business that we wound down through a small asset sale.

In the jungles of Vietnam, in the hamlets with dirt roads, along the brown veins through the rice paddies, they race.

They race with all of their heart. Sweat beading on the forehead. Effort. Exertion. Focus. Focused on winning the bike race.

And I laugh because they’re going so slowly! 1 inch every second. They don’t have race tracks out here. No velodrome. No Tour de France, though France did several tours here. So the kids in the jungle have 30 foot bike races and see who can finish–not first, but last.

Of course, if you lose balance and fall off, you’re disqualified. That’s the hard part. You can’t just hang out and loiter. You can bike side to side, swerving back and forth across everyone else’s path, but if you run into someone, you’ll probably both fall off. So the best strategy is to stay focused on staying as balanced as possible. Some kids try their best to stay perfectly still in one spot. And you can definitely buy some time if you can pull it off. But it’s risky. Your best bet is to be moving forward. Very slowly.

And that’s where I feel like I’m at in life right now. I’ve checked out of the traditional bike race. The one that I’ve gunned for since I was a kid growing up in Silicon Valley, the land of winners and warriors, hypergrowth and home runs. My stability from speeding straight ahead has shifted. I don’t want to finish first right now. What would it be like to finish last? To pick a different race in which finishing last is winning?

I want to partake in this type of race. To see if I can stay balanced while moving slowly. To take every day as slow as I can. Enjoying the details. Playing and having fun. But not stagnating, no. If I stay in one spot, I’ll lose. I want to be growing and progressing. Just enough progress with just enough balance. It’s scary for me. It’s a lot more precarious to be going slowly on a bike. There are things pulling me in all directions and tipping me off balance. It’d be much easier to find a track, to drive towards a goal – create content fulltime, get a job, start a new startup. But I’m excited to let life pull me a little that way, a little this way, as long as I stay balanced and keep inching slowly forward.

So I’m taking time for myself, biking around Williamsburg on breezy afternoons. Traveling with my family to ancient places like Peru, Tunisia, Egypt. Exploring Reddit rabbit holes about cat toys. Hosting game nights with friends where we don’t actually play that many games because everyone just wants to talk to each other. Playing a ton of video games, music, and pickleball.

And for my next thing, I want to break away from institutional scripts. Instead of raising money, I want to raise my cat. Instead of managing the stakes, I want to cook steak. Instead of getting promoted at work, I want to promote my own work. Instead of sprinting to the finish line, I want to focus on balance and sustained progress: savoring the ride, making the most of the journey, and still feeling like a goddamn winner.